islands as the space of fantasy, consumerism, utopia

Mel Gibson's Island

More info found here

concept 1

in progress

love songs

I can't deter my romance for bauhaus. I wish that I could forget
'his' delicate balance and form but I'm left stunned at 'his' image.

fragile, monotone, with desire for balance.......













Marianne Brandt
Untitled (with Anna May Wong)
ca. 1929
























Marianne Brandt
Behind the Scenes
1927






















Marianne Brandt
Montage I
1924

Experimental Jetset

beyond industrialism

(Fig. 1: Pac-Mondrian – a game that relates modernism to ‘classic' game design)
Modernist Utopia in Video Game Design and Theory

Applying Greenhalgh's 12 Principles of Modernism to Videogames
This comparison will start with principles of Decompartimentalisation (1) and The Total Work of Art (2). In a similar way to the ‘project of modernity formulated in the 18 th century by the philosophers of the Enlightenment' (Habermas, 1980:9), the concern of the Modern Movement was to ‘break down barriers between aesthetics, technics and society' (Greenhalgh, 1990:8). Videogame theorists, specially the ones who consider themselves as ludologists, attempt this same sense of decompartimentalisation today. Researcher ITU Copenhagen Espen Aarseth's lecture on the subject of video game theory was entitled Games and the Study of Games – Between Art, Society and Technology (Aarseth, 2004). The notion that videogames combine all this elements contributes to the idea that games are The Total Work of Art. In fact, the Zero Games Manifesto by Emma Westecott states that ‘

The game is the Great Work', a status close enough to the bauhausian idea of ‘Gesamtkunstwerk' – in fact, the number of techniques required to complete a videogame resembles the Bauhaus pedagogic structure (Fig.4)

. Westecott's statement also attempts to finish the debate over the question if videogames are art or not by simply stating that they are bigger that that.

1. Bauhaus' vision of a collectivistic industrial utopia –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
2. Jewish settlers' dream of a collectivistic agrarian utopia


The same forces of modernization that were a prerequisite for the Dessau Bauhaus' New Man (sport, industry, mass society, urban media and tempo) seemed to spell the downfall of the kibbutz's New Man (rural, agrarian, craft-oriented). Another irony is that the collectivistic society assumed by Gropius and other modernists to be Europe's dawning postcapitalist future came closest to realization in Palestine, albeit under substantially different circumstances.

The trend in the kibbutzim during the seventies, with the introduction of certain urban-style entertainment and consumerism, made the kibbutzim even more like the type of communities envisioned by Gropius in the late 1920s.

kibbutzim - Hebrew: קיבוצים‎

Utopia Matters

László Moholy-Nagy’s utopian view that the transformative powers of art could be harnessed for collective social reform—a tenet embedded in much Modernist theory—reflected his early association with the leftist Hungarian group MA (Today), a coalition of artists devoted to the fusion of art and political activism. Moholy-Nagy firmly believed that the art of the present must parallel contemporary reality in order to successfully communicate meaning to a public surrounded by new technological advancements. Hence, he considered traditional, mimetic painting and sculpture obsolete and turned to pure geometric abstraction filtered through the stylistic influence of Russian Constructivism.


**In 1923 he created his first painting on clear plastic, giving physical form to his profound interest in the effects of light, which would later be manifest in film and photography as well as in transparent sculptures, such as the kinetic Dual Form with Chromium Rods.

Utopia Matters: From Brotherhoods to Bauhaus January 22–April 11, 2010
Guggenheim, Berlin

technology and the utopian mise on scene

_ history of utopian thought
_ why we need utopias
_ interruption of utopia by technology (as demise)


Philosophy of Technology

island ; the search proves reasonable

Foreword Huxley wrote in 1952 to the 20th anniversary edition of Brave New World:

If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third alternative. Between the Utopian and primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity... In this community economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian, politics Kropotkinesque co-operative. Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man's Final End, the unitive knowledge of immanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle – the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: "How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End?"



http://www.questiontechnology.org/blog/2009/01/aldous-huxleys-island.html

Asteroid mining

Asteroid mining refers to the hypothetical exploitation of raw materials in deep space on asteroids and planetoids, usually in the Solar System. Minerals and other resources could be mined from an asteroid in space using a variety of methods. Even a relatively small asteroid with a diameter of 1 km can contain billions of metric tons of raw materials.

tracing

Does tracing the past creative trajectory lead to a smarter present in-studio-process?
I started working with cherry blossom trees for the liao collection space. I was transfixed with the location of the space and what was viewable through the windows. The former railroad trestle had an ominous landscape. Butchered tree trucks stood on the edges of the trestle, looking over N. 11th street. I wanted to imagine the dead cherry trees as furtile and glowing. The imagined trees were composited from various web image searches. The final tree branch and blossom images were large in scale, shifting perspective of the viewer to that of a child's point of view. The image was printed in sections (as a grid) onto smokey transparency film. This film was adhered to two large windows (20'x 15' each) so that the view of blunted trees was obscurred. The blossoms radiated light during the day and at night the street lights forced the film to transparency.

No, actually, before that I started with the individual flower....with the movable horizon similiar to cartoon backgrounds, that animate the stage of the scene. The movement I was attempting was to show long distance and monotony. The flowers I was working on were designed to be on the side of this moving horizon. The flowers were plucked by me on video ( and then composited in after effects to eliminate my body ). The flowers were static inthat they were not going to travel left to right but they were active in that they were movable.